Vericool Finance

It is hard to imagine a more ignominious end to a once glittering career than that of Lord Browne of Madingley. After three years of mishaps and disasters, his hard-earned position as Britain’s most admired business leader already lay in tatters. Yet it is his private life that has finally brought him down, exposed in that most heartless of ways as a kiss and tell story by a former lover.

It wasn’t Jeff Chevalier’s allegations of improper business conduct that did for Browne – they were investigated and found to be trivial. It was the fact he lied when under oath when seeking an injunction to prevent the Mail on Sunday printing the details.

The BP chief hadn’t met his former lover when jogging in Battersea Park as he claimed, but through an internet dating service.

The public interest aspect of this sad and silly story looks slim to the point of desperation: it was a fig leaf to cover the prurient motives for telling it. When Browne told his shaving mirror it was not in the interests of BP shareholders that his gay private lifestyle became public property, he was not imagining the problem.

Attitudes, it is true, have changed since he started out. But having risen to prominence, it was too late for him to disavow impressions he had allowed to arise. Yet Browne cannot be let off the hook entirely. The secrecy at the heart of his life added to the closed and defensive nature of the court he created as BP’s “Sun King” – a nickname hinting at the overweening, even dictatorial nature of his leadership.

Ultimately, it was that culture which inflicted the greatest harm on the company because it led, indirectly, to management lapses – culminating in the explosion that killed 15 at the Texas City refinery.

Compared to the ramifications of that, this latest scandal is small beer and ought to have no impact on the operation of the company. Browne’s successor, Tony Hayward, was already lined up to take over from him in July and shareholders may greet his earlier arrival as a welcome opportunity to draw a line under the past.

As for Browne himself, one suspects it is not the end of the world, professionally. The world of arts is one possibility; private equity is another. Indeed, for all the misery he is enduring, his torment will not be entirely unmixed with relief.

There will come a morning when he awakes with a sudden sense that the Damoclean sword that has hung over him for so long has vanished.